I’m trying to figure out the best way to manage many simple moving objects (bulltes, lasers, etc). There are several ways I can think of doing this and each way is inefficient in some major way. I’m hoping someone could give me some advice:
- Store each bullet in its own node in a linked list, complete with its own geometry and transformation matrix.
Good: fast adding/removing and translating/rotating of bullets
Bad: slow to traverse the large linked list for rendering, and to push, multiply, and pop the transformation matrix for each bullet
- Use a large pre-allocated memory block as an interleaved vertex array
Good: Fast rendering
Bad: slow to translate each bullet in its own direction (i’d have to loop through each vertex and add the bullet’s velocity).
Limited number of bullets.
Slow to remove a bullet from the middle of the array (would require copying all subsequent data into the memory location)
- Linked list, but without matrix push/pops
Good: fast adding/removing bullets. Less speed hit than #1 when rendering
Bad: Slow to translate/rotate bullets (would require looping through each vertex and adding velocity as in #2)
I’m really at a loss here, since none of these seems like a very good solution. Maybe someone has a different way or maybe I’m overestimating the speed costs here?
. The framerate of course goes down, but it is because they act as dynamic lights. But having around 50 bullets is still playable. And I dont store their rotation matrices, because I dont need them (I draw them with a kind of billboarding technique).